After the last post Seb got me wondering if there were any differences between libraries, archives and museums when looking at upload and comment activity in Flickr Commons in Aaron’s snapshot of the Flickr Commons metadata.

First I had to get a list of Flickr Commons organizations and classify them as either a library, museum or archive. It wasn’t always easy to pick, but you can see the result here. I lumped galleries in with museums. I also lumped historical societies in with archives. Then I wrote a script that walked around in the Redis database I already had from loading Aaron’s data.

In doing this I noticed there were some Flickr Commons organizations that were missing from Aaron’s snapshot:

• Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office Commons
• The Royal Library, Denmark
• The Finnish Museum of Photography
• Musée McCord Museum

Update: Aaron quickly fixed this.

I didn’t do any research to see if these organizations had significant activity. Also, since there were close to a million files, I didn’t load the British Library activity yet. If there’s interest in adding them into the mix I’ll splurge for the larger ec2 instance.

Anyhow, below are the results. You can find the spreadsheet for these graphs up in Google Docs

This was all done rather quickly, so if you notice anything odd or that looks amiss please let me know. Initially it seemed a bit strange to me that libraries, archives and museums trended so similarly in each graph, even if the volume was different.